User:Monstercat/Richard Vaughan

Richard Vaughan
Richard Vaughan (born on November 9, 1951 in Houston, Texas) is Spain’s most highly recognized English teacher, having created both successful radio and TV shows that serve as highly effective learning platforms with over 2.5 million viewers or listeners. He is also well known as the chairman and CEO of Vaughan Systems, a leading language-training company famous for designing and successfully executing the most innovative language learning approaches and programs in Spain.

After growing up in Houston, Texas and Tulsa, Oklahoma, Vaughan graduated from the University of Texas with degrees in Spanish Language and Literature and Philosophy. He spent his third year of higher education in Madrid, Spain, returning there after graduation in 1974, where he began his career in English teaching. In early 1975, after a four-month experience with the Berlitz School of Languages, he began to free-lance in the teaching trade, which eventually led to the creation of his own company, Vaughan Systems, in 1977. In 1986, he obtained an MBA from the Spanish institution IESE.

Over the first 25 years, his company focused exclusively on the corporate training segment, providing standard in-class group and private language training in addition to residential intensive courses of varying lengths in different idyllic locations around Spain. During the 1990’s, his company was a pioneer in convincing the corporate world to use the intensive, residential approach to training and to place less trust in the conventional in-company training schemes prevalent at the time.

Vaughantown (www.vaughantown.com)

In 2001, he designed and carried out an English-learning project that to this day remains the most highly publicized language training product in Spain. A pilot program of 15 native English-speakers from around the world converged on a tiny, reconstructed village in central Spain to conduct a 6-day “talkathon” in English with 15 Spanish professionals in need of greater fluency and confidence in the language. The fact that the English-speakers were volunteers from Scotland to Australia, coupled with the idea that Spanish professionals could improve their English more with bankers, electricians, retired firemen, housewives or radiologists than with trained English teachers was such an intriguing proposition that Informe Semanal, the Spanish equivalent of the famous U.S. weekly nighttime show “60 Minutes”, aired a 12-minute prime-time report on the pilot program, which was later shown throughout Europe on the E.U. channel Euronews. In the following years, Vaughantown, first called Englishtown, then Pueblo Inglés, and finally by its current name, gained the interest of the U.S and Canadian media, with articles in more than 150 dailies around the two countries, in addition to long Sunday front-page travel section articles in the Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, Dallas Morning News, and Philadelphia Inquirer. The Wall Street Journal and CNN both reported at length on the language-learning experience, which, since 2001, has been replicated almost on a weekly basis, totaling well over 300 programs to date.

Vaughan Radio (www.vaughanradio.com)

In late 2003, Richard Vaughan opened Vaughan Radio, a 24 hour-a-day radio teaching platform that offers different types of classes and English-content radio to approximately half a million listeners in Madrid and three other Spanish cities. To this day, Vaughan Radio remains the only English-teaching radio in the world and has received numerous awards for the novelty of its approach and content.

Aprende Inglés TV (www.aprendeingles.com)

In January 2008, in collaboration with the parent company of the second largest Spanish daily newspaper, El Mundo, Vaughan Systems launched the digital channel “Aprende Inglés TV”, a 24 hour-a-day English-teaching channel available to viewers in Madrid, Valencia and the Balearic Islands, in addition to national coverage on the Imagenio pay channel owned by the Spanish operator Telefonica. Its popularity was meteoric, gaining, in only 15 months on the air, a viewing audience of close to two million people.

Publications (www.vaughantienda.com)

Richard Vaughan has published over 15 different books for learning English, the latest being a best-selling self-help book on how to approach the learning of the language entitled “Si quieres, puedes” (Where there’s a will, there’s a way). The book has sold 25,000 copies since it came out in December 2008.

Vaughan Systems (www.vausys.com)

Richard Vaughan continues, after 32 years at the helm, to manage Vaughan Systems, the company he founded in 1977. Currently, every year over 1,000 Spanish companies and multinationals, 3,000 private individuals and 2,000 children and adolescents attend Vaughan Systems’ classes, residential venues, or options for study abroad.